Loot

by Nadine Gordimer

  the crystallization in regular octahedrons that’s to say eight-sided and in allied forms and the cut and polished ones you see in jewellery more or less follow

  The hands lay together, simply happened, on the skirt over her left thigh, because that is where she had slipped her hand beneath the woolly comfort of the rug. Now he slowly released, first fingers, then palms—at once awareness signals between them that the rug is their tender accomplice, it must not be seen to be stirred by something—he released himself from her and for one bereft moment she thought he had left her behind, his eight-year advantage prevailed against such fusion of palms as it had done, so gently (oh but why) when they were in the dark between trees, when they were in the kitchen.

  colourless or they may be tinted occasionally yellow pink even black

  The hand had not emerged from the rug. She followed as if her eyes were closed or she was in the dark, it went as if it were playing, looking for a place to tickle as children do to make one another wriggle and laugh, where her skirt ended at her knee, going under her knee without displacing the skirt and touching the tendons and the hollow there. She didn’t want to laugh (what would her father make of such a response to his knowledgeable commentary) so she glided her hand to his and put it back with hers where it had been before.

  one of the biggest diamonds in the world after the Koh-i-noor’s hundred-and-nine carats but that was found in India

  The hand, his hand, pressed fingers into her thigh through the cotton flounce as if testing to see what was real about her; and stopped, and then out of the hesitation went down and, under the rug, up under the gauze of skirt, moved over her flesh. She did not look at him and he did not look at her.

  and there are industrial gems you can cut glass with make bits for certain drills the hardest substance known

  At the taut lip of her pants he hesitated again, no hurry, all something she was learning, he was teaching, the anticipation in his fingertips, he stroked along one of the veins in there in the delicate membrane-like skin that is at the crevice between leg and body (like the skin that the sun on manoeuvres couldn’t reach in the crook of his elbow) just before the hair begins. And then he went under the elastic edge and his hand was soft on soft hair, his fingers like eyes attentive to her.

  look at this veld nothing suggests one of the greatest ever, anywhere, down there, down in what we call Blue Earth the diamondiferous core

  She has no clear idea of where his hand is now, what she feels is that they are kissing, they are in each other’s mouths although they cannot look to one another.

  Are you asleep back there?—the mother is remarking her own boredom with the mine—he is eight years older, able to speak: Just listening. His finger explores deep down in the dark, the hidden entrance to some sort of cave with its slippery walls and smooth stalagmite; she’s found, he’s found her.

  The car is passing the mine processing plant.

  product of the death and decay of forests millennia ago just as coal is but down there the ultimate alchemy you might say

  Those others, the parents, they have no way of knowing. It has happened, it is happening under the old wooly rug that was all they can provide for her. She is free; of them. Found; and they don’t know where she is.

  At the camp, the father shakes the soldier’s hand longer than in the usual grip. The mother for a moment looks as if she might give him a peck on the cheek, Godspeed, but it is not her way to be familiar.

  Aren’t you going to say goodbye? She’s not a child, good heavens, a mother shouldn’t have to remind of manners.

  He’s standing outside one of the tents with his hands hanging open at his sides as the car is driven away and the attention is upon her until, with his furry narrowed sight, he’ll cease to be able to make her out while she still can see him, see him until he is made one with all the others in khaki, replicated, crossing and crowding, in preparation to embark.

  If he had been killed in that war they would have heard, through the grandmother’s connections.

  Is it still you; somewhere, old?

  HOMAGE

  Read my lips.

  Because I don’t speak. You’re sitting there, and when the train lurches you seem to bend forward to hear. But I don’t speak.

  If I could find them I could ask for the other half of the money I was going to get when I’d done it, but they’re gone. I don’t know where to look. I don’t think they’re here, anymore, they’re in some other country, they move all the time and that’s how they find men like me. We leave home because of governments overthrown, a conscript on the wrong side; no work, no bread or oil in the shops, and when we cross a border we’re put over another border, and another. What is your final destination? We don’t know; we don’t know where we can stay, where we won’t be sent on somewhere else, from one tent camp to another in a country where you can’t get papers.

  I don’t ever speak.

  They find us there, in one of these places—they found me and they saved me, they can do anything, they got me in here with papers and a name they gave me; I buried my name, no-one will ever dig it out of me. They told me what they wanted done and they paid me half the money right away. I ate and I had clothes to wear and I had a room in a hotel where people read the menu outside three different restaurants before deciding where to have their meal. There was free shampoo in the bathroom and the key to a private safe where liquor was kept instead of money.

  They had prepared everything for me. They had followed him for months and they knew when he went where, at what time—although he was such an important man, he would go out privately with his wife, without his State bodyguards, because he liked to pretend to be an ordinary person or he wanted to be an ordinary person. They knew he didn’t understand that that was impossible for him; and that made it possible for them to pay me to do what they paid me to do.

  I am nobody; no country counts me in its census, the name they gave me doesn’t exist: nobody did what was done. He took time off, with his wife by the arm, to a restaurant with double doors to keep out the cold, the one they went to week after week, and afterwards, although I’d been told they always went home, they turned into a cinema. I waited. I had one beer in a bar, that’s all, and I came back. People coming out of the cinema didn’t show they recognised him because people in this country like to let their leaders be ordinary. He took his wife, like any ordinary citizen, to that corner where the entrance goes down to the subway trains and as he stood back to let her pass ahead of him I did it. I did it just as they paid me to, as they tested my marksmanship for, right in the back of the skull. As he fell and as I turned to run, I did it again, as they paid me to, to make sure.

  She made the mistake of dropping on her knees to him before she looked up to see who had done it. All she could tell the police, the papers and the inquiry was that she saw the back of a man in dark clothing, a leather jacket, leaping up the flight of steps that leads from the side-street. This particular city is one of steep rises and dark alleys. She never saw my face. Years later now, (I read in the papers) she keeps telling people how she never saw the face, she never saw the face of the one who did it, if only she had looked up seconds sooner—they would have been able to find me, the nobody who did it would have become me. She thinks all the time about the back of my head in the dark cap (it was not dark, really, it was a light green-and-brown check, an expensive cap I’d bought with the money, afterwards I threw it in the canal with a stone in it). She thinks of my neck, the bit of my neck she could have seen between the cap and the collar of the leather jacket (I couldn’t throw that in the canal, I had it dyed). She thinks of the shine of the leather jacket across my shoulders under the puddle of light from a street-lamp that stands at the top of the flight, and my legs moving so fast I disappear while she screams.

  The police arrested a drug-pusher they picked up in the alley at the top of the steps. She couldn’t say whether or not it was him because she had no face to remember. The same with others the
police raked in from the streets and from those with criminal records and political grievances; no face. So I had nothing to fear. All the time I was being pushed out of one country into another I was afraid, afraid of having no papers, afraid of being questioned, afraid of being hungry, but now I had nothing to be afraid of. I still have nothing to fear. I don’t speak.

  I search the papers for whatever is written about what was done; the inquiry doesn’t close, the police, the people, this whole country, keep on searching. I read all the theories; sometimes, like now, in the subway train, I make out on the back of someone’s newspaper a new one. An Iranian plot, because of this country’s hostility towards some government there. A South African attempt to revenge this country’s sanctions against some racist government there, at the time. I could tell who did it, but not why. When they paid me the first half of the money—just like that, right away!—they didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask. Why should I ask; what government, on any side, anywhere, would take me in. They were the only people to offer me anything.

  And then I got only half what they promised. And there isn’t much left after five years, five years next month. I’ve done some sort of work, now and then, so no-one would be wondering where I got the money to pay the rent for my room and so on. Worked at the race course, and once or twice in night clubs. Places where they don’t register you with any labour office. What was I thinking I was going to do with the money if I had got it all, as they promised? Get away, somewhere else? When I think of going to some other country, like they did, taking out at the frontier the papers and the name of nobody they gave me, showing my face—

  I don’t talk.

  I don’t take up with anybody. Not even a woman. Those places I worked, I would get offers to do things, move stolen goods, handle drugs: people seemed to smell out somehow I’d made myself available. But I am not! I am not here, in this city. This city has never seen my face, only the back of a man leaping up the steps that led to the alley near the subway station. It’s said, I know, that you return to the scene of what you did. I never go near, I never walk past that subway station. I’ve never been back to those steps. When she screamed after me as I disappeared, I disappeared for ever.

  I couldn’t believe it when I read that they were not going to bury him in a cemetery. They put him in the bit of public garden in front of the church that’s near the subway station. It’s an ordinary-looking place with a few old trees dripping in the rain on gravel paths, right on a main street. There’s an engraved stone and a low railing, that’s all. And people come in their lunch-hour, people come while they’re out shopping, people come up out of that subway, out of that cinema, and they tramp over the gravel to go and stand there, where he is. They put flowers down.

  I’ve been there. I’ve seen. I don’t keep away. It’s a place like any other place, to me. Every time I go there, following the others over the crunch of feet on the path, I see even young people weeping, they put down their flowers and sometimes sheets of paper with what looks like lines of poems written there (I can’t read this language well), and I see that the inquiry goes on, it will not end until they find the face, until the back of nobody turns about. And that will never happen. Now I do what the others do. It’s the way to be safe, perfectly safe. Today I bought a cheap bunch of red roses held by an elastic band wound tight between their crushed leaves and wet thorns, and laid it there, before the engraved stone, behind the low railing, where my name is buried with him.

  AN EMISSARY

  ‘ … how few Westerners grasp malaria’s devastation. That said, its global toll remains staggering. In the last 20 years, it has killed nearly twice as many people as AIDS … . Malarial mosquitoes can even stow away on international flights—just ask recent unsuspecting victims near airports in Germany, Paris and São Paulo’.

  All impurity hazing away, middleage evanescing, you can’t really make out their jowls and eye-pouches in the steam, and your own face if you could see it would be smudged, all that you’ve done to it, the wriggles of red veins down the nose, wafted from view. Underneath is you as you were.

  This place calls itself Fredo’s Sauna and Health Club. But when you’re lying here you’re a senator among senators and nobles in a Roman bath. It’s winter now—no need to worry, no dangerous ultraviolet striking you, nothing noxious survives. Winter now but there’s no shivering here! Never any winter. In the humidity summer lives on; and there’s some tiny thing floating out off the misty heat—can’t be—no, must be a shred of someone’s towel—but it lands on a plump wet pectoral, just above the hair-forest there, it’s alive—and now dead, smack! A deformed punctuation mark of black, a scrap of wing, sliding on sweat.

  REBIRTH

  Winter outside but there’s water and privacy for breeding, eggs to lie low where no-one could imagine it, a place in which to emerge as you were, sloping back, transparent wings and special proboscis feature, in Fredo’s Sauna and Health Club.

  The musical conversation of the orchestra, tuning up rather like athletes running-on-the-spot and shadow-punching, before performance; it even includes the pitch of anticipation in the low interchange of human voices. A diminuendo from this audience, as the musicians come from the wings, and a rallentando when the guest conductor, a famous young Czech or whatever, appears to bow, turn his back, mount the podium and settle his shoulders in readiness to enter the symphony with raised baton.

  HEAVENLY CHORUS OF THE SPHERES

  It’s winter, but nobody coughs. The sonority of wind, strings and keyboard calms all, the following tempest of brass sweeps away all reactions but the aural. The cello and viola file into the temple of each ear with the intoning of monks, there’s the query of the flute, the double-stopping grunt of the bass, the berating of drums and an answering ping of a triangle. All these creatures produce the beauty of the invisible life of sound. They dive, they soar, they ripple and glide almost beyond the reach of reception, and swell to return; some overwhelm others and then in turn are subsumed, but all are there somewhere in the layers of empyrean they ravishingly invade and transmute. They weave in and out of it, steal through it, flow into eight hundred sets of ears—it’s a full house when this conductor comes out on tour from one of those dangerous benighted Balkan countries that are always seceding and fighting and changing their names.

  The auditorium is kept welcomingly heated by artificial means and by the pleasant warmth of human breath. A minute manifestation of being flies with the music, contributing a high, long-drawn fiddle-note. Nobody hears this Ariel materialise round their heads.

  On the other hemisphere—Southern—it is summer, not simulation that makes all the year a summer.

  WINGED CHARIOT

  They are not here officially, driving on a rutted muddy road between baobab trees, if officially means that your whereabouts are known to close collaterals—wives, husbands, and professional partners. An irresistible mutual impulse—like the original unlikely one that brought them together—to take to themselves something more than two hours once a week under an assumed name in an obscure hotel, had discovered in each the ability to devise unbelievably believable absences, the call of professional commitments. They took a plane, carefully not travelling even in the same class (how clever passion makes even those who have been honest and open all their lives). They chose an unlikely destination—they hoped; in their circles people travel a lot and quite adventurously, so long as the camps are luxury ones with open-air bars and helicopter service.

  The baobabs are mythical animals turned to stone.

  Whenever before would he have found himself beside a woman who would come out with such delightful fantasies! She’s a writer, and sees everywhere what he has never seen; he’s an economist, privy to so much about the workings of the world she always has felt herself ignorant of, and here he is, listening with admiration to her trivial knack of imagery.

  This adventure of theirs can only last a few days—the credibility of the alibis won’t allow longer—and it has come l
ate and totally unexpected, to both of them. Husband, wife, half-grown children, reputation—now a last chance: of what? Something missed, now to be urgently claimed. He loves her to speak poetry to him as he drives. It’s her poetry, appropriated by her to accompany her life, the poets knowing always better than she does what is happening to her; now, to them. What they have done is crazy, the final destination a bad end; the realisation comes silently to each with a bump in the rutted road. Then she’s saying for them both, as the medium possessed by a dead poet, the lines don’t all reach her in the right sequence—at my back I always hear, Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near … let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up … and tear our pleasures with rough strife through the iron gates of life … the grave’s a fine and private place but none I think do there embrace …

  He swerves to the side of the deserted road and turns off the ignition. They stare at each other and he breaks the spell with a smile and slow-moving head, side-to-side. There’s no-one, nothing to witness the embrace, the struggle of each not to let go. Then he suddenly frees himself, gets out of the car, opens the passenger door and takes her by the hand. There are old puddles, soupy with stagnation, to step across. The sagging remains of a broken fence: whose land was this, once. No-one, nothing. The sun rests on their backs as a benign hand, they walk a little while over stubble, viscous hollows bleary with past rain, and cannot walk farther, are arrested by need. And there is some tree that really is a tree, in leaf over a low mound of tender grass grown in its moist shelter.